Diplomacy Quotes (111 Quotes)

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  “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

  Sun Tzu

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  “Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.”

  Mario Puzo

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  “If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.”

  Sue Monk Kidd

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  “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

  H.L. Mencken

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  “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”

  Theodore Roosevelt

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  “You're in America now," I said. "Our idea of diplomacy is showing up with a gun in one hand and a sandwich in the other and asking which you'd prefer.”

  Jim Butcher

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  “Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.”

  Isaac Newton

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  “Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.”

  Doug Wright

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  “Don't hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft!”

  Theodore Roosevelt

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  “If you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

  Theodore Roosevelt

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  “Diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power.”

  Robin Hobb

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  “Tact is the ability to step on a man's toes without messing up the shine on his shoes.”

  Harry Truman

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  “Force is all conquering, but it's victories are short lived.”

  Abraham Lincoln

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  “But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord."
  
  "It might to keep it open.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin

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• “1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere.
  
  2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times....
  
  3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions.
  
  4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred.
  
  5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth.
  
  It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.”

  Christopher Hitchens

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  “I--buy, and I sell."
  "You're a thief.”

  Tamora Pierce

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  “One cannot toss ambassadors back like bad fish," said Eugenides. "You treat them with care, or you'll find you've committed an act of war.”

  Megan Whalen Turner

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  “It is a principle of diplomacy that one must know something of the truth in order to lie convincingly.”

  Tom Clancy

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• “Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings.
  
  I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.”

  Christopher Hitchens

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  “The other Dons in the room applauded and rose to shake hands with everybody in sight and to congratulate Don Corleone and Don Tattaglia on their new friendship. It was not perhaps the warmest friendship in the world, they would not send each other Christmas gift greetings, but they would not murder each other. That was friendship enough in this world, all that was needed.”

  Mario Puzo

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  “People who keep their feelings to themselves tend not to know, after a while, what their feelings are.”

  Paul Berman

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  “A diplomat who says “yes” means “maybe", a diplomat who says “maybe" means “no”, and a diplomat who says “no” is no diplomat.”

  Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord

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  “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall take flack from both sides."- Unofficial UN Motto”

  Robert Lynn Asprin

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  “Be a craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting.”

  Ptahhotep

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  “Eastward and westward storms are breaking,--great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable.”

  W.E.B. Du Bois

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